David Brooks thinks Trump is destroying the constitution --- but Democrats might be worse

I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump. So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?

According to a recent Gallup poll, 35 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, 35 percent call themselves moderate and 26 percent call themselves liberal. The candidates at the debates this week fall mostly within the 26 percent. The party seems to think it can win without any of the 35 percent of us in the moderate camp, the ones who actually delivered the 2018 midterm win.

The progressive narrative is dominating in part because progressives these days have a direct and forceful story to tell and no interest in compromising it. It’s dominating because no moderate wants to bear the brunt of progressive fury by opposing it.

It’s also dominating because the driving dynamic in this campaign right now is not who can knock off Joe Biden, the more moderate front-runner. It’s who can survive the intense struggle between Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and others to be the surviving left-wing alternative. All the energy and competition is on the progressive side. Biden tries to bob and weave above it all while the whole debate pulls sharply leftward.

I'm sorry, but there is no "Jeb Bush lane" in the Democratic Party.

As this excellent post by Neil H. Buchanan at The Verdict legal blog points out, NeverTrumpers are "perfectly satisfied with the radical-right changes wrought by Republicans (and triangulating Democrats) over the past four decades. ... By contrast, it is on matters of process, not substance, that the anti-Trump right actually has a good point to make."

In other words, their appalled reaction to the assault on the Constitution, and on the political norms that make it possible for the system to function, is where they have the power to make a difference. As Buchanan writes, "American conservatives who are genuine 'constitutional conservatives' understand that there are more important things than, say, the optimal design of the estate tax. ... If you are on the winning side in the fight to save our constitutional democracy, you can live to fight another day to attempt to reverse your losses in the fights over various substantive policies. But the opposite is not true, because if we lose the fight for our political system, there will be no more opportunities to fight for anything else."

I know these guys want Democrats to beat Donald Trump. But Democrats have a large coalition that must be respected by their leaders. These Republicans should take their own smug advice, get off Twitter and pay attention to what's happening on the ground. They'll find a party that is ideologically diverse, and even more committed to defeating Donald Trump than they are. Democrats will make their decisions accordingly.

But if there are Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who are appalled by Trump's assault on the system and the Republican Party's descent into madness, these NeverTrumpers could make their best contribution e by helping those folks realize that stopping Trump means we can all live to fight each other another day on the issues where we may strongly disagree. There's no guarantee of that if Trump wins again.

Democrats aren’t making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump. They are good at pointing to Trump’s cruelties, especially toward immigrants. They are good at describing the ways he is homophobic and racist. But the rest of the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.

A decent society rests on a bed of manners, habits, traditions and institutions. Trump is a disrupter. He rips to shreds the codes of politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity, and so renders society a savage world of dog eat dog. Democrats spend very little time making this case because defending tradition, manners and civility sometimes cuts against the modern progressive temper.